Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I have been way too busy for my own good these days. Working too many hours on an irregular schedule and trying to have a social life, dance, and take care of myself, yikes!! For this reason, I have been eating out a lot lately, which does not give me much in terms of brilliant recipes to share but it has certainly challenged me to find super healthy options on the go. My favorite discovery is that going to the salad bar at the grocery store took me less time today than it may have taken to get something processed heated up in a drive-thru. I walked into Wegman's, our main grocery store in Buffalo, got myself a huge salad from their ever expanding salad and prepared food bar and was out in five minutes. That's right, 5 minutes to actually walk into an establishment, choose my own combination of foods that were fresh and healthy and get back to my car. That, my friends is proof that you can eat fresh, good, whole, raw food on the go, on your busiest of days. Many groceries stores also carry pre-packaged salads which can also be a good option, but they usually combine nuts, cheese, meat, dried fruit sweetened with sugar, etc. I recommend finding somewhere with a decent salad bar and going crazy! Do heed some caution, however, on putting too much on your salad. Just cause it has lettuce on the bottom, doesn't mean it is automatically raw and healthy. Keep it simple, if you are putting avocado on your salad, don't put nuts or vice versa. Keep the dressing as simple as possible too, like some nice balsamic vinegar and fresh ground pepper. Play with different combinations of veggies to see how many different salads you can create!I also highly recommend taking lots of raw fruit with you when you know you will be on the go all morning and keeping a stash of dried fruit and raw nuts with you at all times. I wouldn't rely too much on the nuts and fruit to make up the majority of what you consume while out but it is nice to have when you have no other options and start considering frosted banana bread...I speak from experience. : )